Please don't write sentences like this....Just stop...

Fox News: Gov. Bob McConnell (D-VA) found guilty on corruption charges...

U.S. appeals court rules gay marriage bans in Wisconsin, Indiana unconstitutional

Source: startribune.com

CHICAGO — A U.S. appeals court in Chicago has ruled that gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana are unconstitutional.

Thursday's decision by a three-judge panel at the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals bumps the number of states where gay marriage will be legal from 19 to 21. The decision was unanimous.

The Wisconsin and Indiana cases shifted to Chicago after their attorneys general appealed separate lower court rulings in June tossing the bans. The 7th Circuit stayed those rulings pending its own decision.

During oral arguments in August, one judge appointed by a Republican likened same-sex marriage bans to laws once barring interracial marriage. Judge Richard Posner said they derived from "hate ... and savage discrimination" of gays.

The states argued the prohibitions helped foster a centuries-old tradition.


Read more: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/273992681.html

Dad in hot-car death case indicted on murder, child cruelty charges

Source: L.A. Times

Justin Ross Harris, a Georgia man accused of intentionally leaving his toddler in a hot car for seven hours in June and sexting with multiple women as the boy died, was indicted Thursday on eight charges, including murder and child cruelty..

Harris faces five charges directly related to 22-month-old Cooper’s death: one count of malice murder, two of felony murder and two of cruelty to children. The Cobb County grand jury indicted a 33-year-old father accused of leaving his son in a hot car on eight criminal charges.

He also faces three charges related to providing sexual pictures and descriptions to a girl younger than 18 and requesting photos of her genitals, according to the indictment by a Cobb County grand jury: two counts of disseminating harmful material to minors and one count of attempting to sexually exploit children.

Harris left work at 4:15 p.m. -- apparently to go watch "22 Jump Street" with friends -- and, while driving to the theater, brought his car to a screeching halt near a strip mall and pulled his son's body out of the car, apparently in distress after discovering what he'd done. But during a court hearing in July, police said that wasn't the first time Harris had gone back to his car since he arrived at work. Police said surveillance video showed that after he got a ride to lunch with some friends, Harris went back around midday to put light bulbs inside the car, where his son was strapped into a rear-facing car seat.


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-hot-car-murder-justin-ross-harris-20140904-story.html

Has Greenwald, Inc. Peaked?

or about a year, the global enterprise you might call Glenn Greenwald, Inc. has been taking off like a red-hot app. The question now is whether the sudden rise of Greenwald—a 47-year-old lawyer-cum-activist from Queens by way of George Washington University—will soon follow the course of most Information Age startups: Boom. Bust. Bye.



Only a year and a half ago, Greenwald was a left-wing blogger who was known mainly to a devoted band of online followers for his invariably harsh view of American national security policy and fierce advocacy of openness in government. Among those who was said to follow Greenwald’s writings was a discontented digital operative working deep inside what both he and Greenwald viewed as a Big Brother-style surveillance state. That guy’s name was Edward Snowden.

The rest is history. Or journalism. Or treason. Or something. Starting in June 2013 , the revelation that Snowden had handed over to Greenwald — along with the Washington Post and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras— a huge trove of documents detailing National Security Agency operations amounted to the biggest breach of official intelligence secrets in history.



Today, riding on his international fame—a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards— Greenwald is still a one-man exposure industry whose main stock in trade remains these same “Snowden archives.” He continues to drizzle out fresh revelations about the NSA based on Snowden’s documents, including some neatly timed with the rollout of his book, No Place to Hide, in May. He has started up a digital magazine called The Intercept from his base in Brazil—with 20 journalists hired so far, and 30 more hires to come, he says—thanks to backing from a new $250 million company called First Look Media founded by billionaire admirer Pierre Omidyar, the French-Iranian-American creator of eBay. Omidyar and Greenwald also have launched a new foundation to help journalists in legal trouble, the Press Freedom Litigation Fund, the first grantee of which is Greenwald’s Brazilian live-in partner, David Miranda. Though he’s not a journalist, Miranda is suing the British government over the seizure of Greenwald’s documents, which the Brazilian was trying to carry to his partner by going through London’s Heathrow Airport in August of last year.


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/glenn-greenwald-inc-peaked-110576.html?hp=l4#.VAiwIaTD9zl

And, as if on cue, Greenwald gets into a pissing match with Ken Dilanian of the L.A. Times for doing the same thing he does...

EDIT: As expected, Glenn's buddies don't take long to spring to his defense -- I present to you Erik Wemple's response (Funny that he calls this a "hit piece" when the actual criticism is quite mild: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/09/04/7-problems-with-politico-magazines-hit-piece-on-glenn-greenwald/

Only now after all these years have I discovered GD's filthy secret:

Jersey Mike's Subs....?

Just a pet peeve of mine...Just WHEN did it become so popular for Jersey Mike's and any sandwich shop not named Subway to NOT have regular yellow mustard available as a condiment??

Mysterious Fake Cellphone Towers Are Intercepting Calls All Over The US

Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.
Rather than offering you cellphone service, the towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts.

Les Goldsmith, the CEO of ESD America, used ESD's CryptoPhone 500 to detect 17 bogus cellphone towers. ESD is a leading American defense and law enforcement technology provider based in Las Vegas.

With most phones, these fake communication towers are undetectable. But not for the CryptoPhone 500, a customized Android device that is disguised as a Samsung Galaxy S III but has highly advanced encryption.

Goldsmith told Popular Science: "Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found eight different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

The towers were found in July, but the report implied that there may have been more out there.

Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases.

"Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are," Goldsmith said to Popular Science.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-intercept-calls-2014-9


I imagine it would be pretty easy to find out who the owners are -- Start damaging or vandalizing the towers, and see who complains...

Arundhati Roy: How Corporate Power Converted Wealth Into Philanthropy for Social Control

The following is an excerpt from Arundhati Roy's new book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, (Haymarket Books, 2014). Reprinted here with permission.

What follows in this essay might appear to some to be a somewhat harsh critique. On the other hand, in the tradition of honoring one’s adversaries, it could be read as an acknowledgment of the vision, flexibility, sophistication, and unwavering determination of those who have dedicated their lives to keeping the world safe for capitalism.

Their enthralling history, which has faded from contemporary memory, began in the United States in the early twentieth century when, kitted out legally in the form of endowed foundations, corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity as Capitalism’s (and Imperialism’s) road-opening and systems maintenance patrol.

Among the first foundations to be set up in the United States were the Carnegie Corporation, endowed in 1911 by profits from Carnegie Steel Company, and the Rockefeller Foundation, endowed in 1914 by J. D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Company. The Tatas and Ambanis of their time.

Some of the institutions financed, given seed money, or supported by the Rockefeller Foundation are the United Nations, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), New York’s most fabulous Museum of Modern Art, and, of course, the Rockefeller Center in New York (where Diego Riviera’s mural had to be blasted off the wall because it mischievously depicted reprobate capitalists and a valiant Lenin; Free Speech had taken the day off ).

Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and the world’s richest man. He was an abolitionist, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and a teetotaler. He believed his money was given to him by God, which must have been nice for him.
http://www.alternet.org/books/arundhati-roy-how-corporate-power-converted-wealth-philanthropy-social-control

Putin’s propoganda keeps Russians in the dark about Ukraine and more

By Editorial Board August 31 at 6:49 PM
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN, his bitter resentment at the Soviet empire’s collapse metastasized into seething Russian nationalism, has marginalized the political opposition, muzzled dissidents and intimidated independent voices in civil society. In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, he has also resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark — or profoundly misinformed — about events in their neighbor to the west.

Most Russians get their news from state-
controlled broadcast outlets, which have moved beyond mere propaganda into outlandish conspiracy theories and unhinged jingoism. The shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner in July, over territory controlled by Russian-sponsored militias in Ukraine, was spun by Kremlin’s media mouthpieces into a provocation orchestrated by the West. With few countervailing views in the mainstream media, many Russians believed the spin or had no idea what to believe.

In support of those Russian-sponsored militias in eastern Ukraine, now backed by growing ranks of Russian troops and weapons, Moscow has created a fantasy that plays on Russian victimization. By this rendering, the forces backing Ukraine’s government in Kiev are fascists and neo-Nazis, a portrayal that Mr. Putin personally advanced on Friday, when he likened the Ukrainian army’s attempts to regain its own territory to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II, an appeal meant to inflame Russians’ already overheated nationalist emotions.

In the absence of independent and free reporting, few Russians realize that Russian soldiers and armaments are in action in eastern Ukraine, albeit (as in Crimea) in uniforms and vehicles stripped of their identifying insignia and license plates. With no free media, Russians are left to fend for themselves against a firestorm of falsehoods.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putins-propoganda-keeps-russians-in-the-dark-about-ukraine-and-more/2014/08/31/6ba4114a-2fc5-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html


I will say it's becoming easier and easier to identify the "useful idiots" in this charade...